But for pete’s sake, that doesn’t mean you have to act them out. Nabokov and child rape: The writing exists and the action never did—does that mean the writing replaced the action? It’s possible that Nabokov had monstrous desires, and channeled those desires into his own work. Which is not to say that his work was written from a therapeutic or cathartic standpoint—god forbid—but that he had the great artist’s impulse to step toward what was most awful in himself, rather than away from it.
